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How to Write Effective Orton-Gillingham Progress Reports

Monday, April 30, 2018

Tips for Sharing Progress with Parents

Whether you are working in private practice as an Orton-Gillingham tutor
or working with students in a classroom or school setting, sharing information
about a student’s progress is an important part of our work. When it comes to
learning to read, a child’s progress is as individual as the Orton-Gillingham lesson plans themselves. While you can’t click on an
icon and get an instant progress report, there are some tips that can make this
task a bit less overwhelming.

·Set a schedule that is manageable for you.
Monthly, every other month or quarterly are potentially good schedules
depending on your caseload and progress report format. Pre and post testing
results should be reported separately. For more on finding starting points and monitoring progress, "Finding A Starting Point Using The Orton-Gillingham Approach" may help. Some tutors may choose to only complete
a formal progress report annually when conducting some testing to demonstrate
growth.

oCaution: It is better to consistently provide
less frequent reports in a timely manner than to promise more than you can
comfortably manage.

·For narrative reports, it is helpful to have a
format or an editable template like THIS ONE that you use to streamline the report writing. A three part
approach in which you:

1. List strengths

2. Explain what the student has
been working on in that level of OG, what they demonstrate mastery in and how
this learning relates to the goal of this OG level

3. Describe the goal for next
steps or continued practice.

I find for students that are
reading novels or working with particular focus on additional skills such as
handwriting, intensive phonemic awareness work or visual tracking, it is
helpful to include a sentence or two about your recent focus or how the student
is responding to the book.

·Make sure to write the reports with parents in
mind. It is possible to spend a great deal of time writing beautifully detailed
and accurate reports that are incredibly helpful to a fellow professional, but
overwhelming and confusing for a layperson or parent. This is one of those
things I learned the hard way. I find that one way to make the concepts a bit
more concrete is to give examples of the types of words that the student is
able to read and write given the new concepts that they have mastered.

oExample: With her latest skills, Jane Doe is able to read and write words
like pigtail, mailbox, pathway, railway and dismay.

·Consider using a checklist format with a few brief
comments to make reporting on groups or large numbers of students more
manageable. A checklist allows parents to see relatively quickly the amount of
material covered and what will be coming up in the near future.

In addition to formal reports, there are some great ways to
share information less formally both using technology and more traditional
methods. The less frequently a teacher provides formal reporting, the more
important these frequent check-ins become.

·There is nothing quite like face to face
conversation about what you are working on, what was tricky and how the child
performed during the lesson. Especially for younger children, this ongoing
parental contact is hugely valuable. It is important to note that you want to
also provide something that parents can share with teachers or refer back to.

·An exit slip not only makes a great
communication tool, but also a way of assessing a student’s understanding of
new learning. At the end of the lesson, you ask the student to tell about their
new learning while you record their answer on a form to share with their
family. Repeating the concept in a clear and concise manner requires
synthesizing their learning in a very powerful way.

·Many tutors use software to manage their clients
and schedule that includes an option to share lesson notes with the parent.
This is another way to provide frequent short 1-2 sentence updates about the
student’s learning. For groups of tutors working together, this is a really
nice way to keep communication open and ongoing.

·A picture is worth a thousand words and seeing a
lesson for themselves is a very powerful way to share with parents the work
that you are doing with their child. Inviting them to sit in on a lesson from
time to time or sharing a videotape is sometimes easier than putting the child’s
skill growth into words.

·For the technologically inclined, there are some
wonderful options online for portfolio sharing including the app, Seesaw. Students can
share photos, work samples, videos etc. This online portfolio can not only show
up to the minute examples of the student’s work, but it can provide a very
orderly and concrete way to show growth over time.

However, you choose to go about it, parent communication is an important cornerstone of our practice. What is successful for one teacher may not be right for the next and you may need to use different strategies with different families. However, when we work together, it helps our students reach their fullest potential.

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